YIC2025

MS027 - Numerical Modeling of High-Speed Aero-thermodynamics

Organized by: A. Ceci (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy), D. Passiatore (Università del Salento, Italy), M. Di Renzo (Università del Salento, Italy) and D. Modesti (Gran Sasso Science Institute, Italy)
Keywords: Aero-thermodynamics, CFD, High-Speed Flows, HPC
This mini-symposium aims at collecting recent advancements in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for high-speed aerodynamics. Interest in high-speed flows has been steadily growing over the past few years, and it is motivated by substantial investments in space exploration and suborbital flight by private industries and governments. In the space-exploration case, the will to reduce the cost of access to space requires the development of reusable and efficient vehicles capable of reentering the atmosphere multiple times surviving to the flow generated at extremely high Mach numbers. Suborbital vehicles instead would dramatically reduce the time required for the intercontinental transfer of people and goods and, however, their operation pose significant technological challenges. At lower altitudes, turbulence plays a critical role, while at higher altitudes, low-density effects and flow rarefaction become more important. Both these applications feature very high-speed interactions between vehicles and the atmosphere and, considering the complexity of reproducing high-speed aero-thermodynamics in experimental ground-based facilities, their development would benefit from reliable numerical data. To accurately simulate these varying conditions, high-fidelity numerical models are required. Advances in CFD and High-Performance Computing (HPC) have enabled large-scale simulations of high-speed flows. However, many aspects of hypersonic flow physics are still not fully understood. Additionally, turbulence models currently employed in hypersonic vehicle design have been developed under incompressible assumptions, and their predictive performance for high-speed flows is highly uncertain. In this mini-symposium we aim to gather the numerical community of high-speed flows to discuss the most recent progress in the field. Areas of focus include, but are not limited to: • HPC of high-speed flows • Numerical schemes, models, and algorithms • Wall-bounded high-speed turbulence • Laminar-to-turbulent transition in high speed flows • Turbulence modeling for high-speed flows • High-enthalpy effects for gas-phase and surface processes • Fluid-structure interaction in high-speed flows • Application of CFD to supersonic/hypersonic engineering